Some of you will undoubtedly identify with this testimony, some may find it
upsetting and others may simply retain the information, sensing there will be a
time and a place when it will be useful.

For the first 15 years of my life, I lived in a small town in eastern
Ontario. My family (Father, Mother and I) attended the United Church of Canada,
and I certainly would have considered myself a Christian, although when asked, I
would say I was a Protestant. In our community, there were only two churches;
the other was Roman Catholic. I did not have any great understanding of other
denominations. I simply knew there were Catholics and Protestants, and I was
aware of the Anglican church, because my mother was raised Anglican and I was
baptized, as an infant, in her family church in Toronto.

I can honestly say I do not remember a single sermon taught in all my years
in the United Church. There are probably many reasons for this, but I believe
the primary one is that our family did not have solid biblical foundations; the
Bible and Jesus were just reserved for Sunday. I knew right from wrong; I had
even learned the Ten Commandments, but they were simply words to me, because we
never talked about spiritual things at home.

Then in May of my 15th year, my father died suddenly while out of
the country on a business trip. This news was devastating for my mother and I. I
had been going through a rebellious stage, especially with my father. In my
"humble" opinion, my parents both knew nothing; I knew it all. Although I obeyed
them, I talked back all the time. I was well aware of the pressure this placed
on Dad, in particular. I realized how much he loved me and the stress between us
was particularly heavy the day he left on this trip. I told him, I hoped he
would not get sick while he was away, as he had stomach troubles, which often
flared up when in a foreign country. It was my way of trying to tell him I
cared. However, my mother saw it differently, and said, "What an awful thing to
say?" Adolescence is hard; even when we attempt to do what is right, it often
turns out badly. Today, I can see the results of my rebellion. I could blame my
behaviour on hormones, but really, I just failed to submit to the delegated
authority God had placed in my life, in my parents, teachers and others.

When we heard about my Dad, the first words out of my mouth were, "It’s all
my fault". You see, he had died of a cerebral hemorrhage and these are
frequently triggered by psychological pressure. My Dad was a Type A personality
anyway, but I felt certain I had contributed to that pressure. I’m aware today
that I’m not responsible for his death, but I still feel sad when I think about
the time we lost because I was too proud to submit to his authority. I’m
emphasizing this point because of any young people who may be reading this
testimony; I hope you will read these words and learn respond to those God
places in positions of Delegated Authority in your lives. God gives us many good
gifts, including free will, but it’s not meant to be abused. We still are
required to go to Him and those He places over us to seek advice and counsel
before we step out on our own.

Well, what I did next was my undoing. When I say we lived in a small
community, I mean small. There were no more than 500 families, so we all knew
each other quite well. On the day we received news of my father’s death, our
minister called on us, but he never returned. As a result, of what I interpreted
as lack of concern, I rejected the church, although I have often been quick to
say I did not reject God. That was a lie of the enemy. I had rejected the
church, - His Body, His hands and feet on earth, and so I had rejected Him.
Always independent, I figured I’d be okay on my own. I didn’t need them. Just me
and Jesus would work; but I was very wrong - we do need each other. The only
real saving grace for God in my life came through the local Roman Catholic
priest. He was a great support to my mother, even though we were not Roman
Catholic. His ministry went beyond his denomination into the lives of all the
people in his parish. Because of him, I realized God was still to be trusted,
but I did not have a strong or deep enough understanding of scriptures to guide
me at that time. When I walked away from the church, I came out from under the
spiritual authority (good or bad) that God had put in my life. Now, I began my
walk in rebellion, alone.

In the New Testament (Acts 6: 1 – 3), you can read about how the early church
was concerned for the orphans and widows. They recognized that without the
covering of the church, women and children were vulnerable to attacks by the
enemy and society. Well, this is where my mother and I found ourselves, and the
door opened wide for Satan to come into our lives.

Within a couple of weeks of my father’s death, I lost my virginity, while
searching for the missing love and spiritual cover in my life. I bought the lie,
"If you love me, you’ll …" This is one of the enemy’s favorite lies. He counts
on us buying this and forgetting God loves us unconditionally. God, the Father,
never bargains with us; He just loves us, no matter what. We don’t need to do
anything in particular in order to receive His love.

By losing my virginity, I gave the enemy an inch but he took far more than
the proverbial mile. He sent in every weapon he had at his disposal to blind me
and deafen me to the truth, which God places in each one of us from the moment
of conception. Without being told, we all know what acts are socially
unacceptable, including premarital sex, theft and murder, but when the enemy is
allowed to penetrate the innate protection God gives us, we are liable to do
almost anything without thinking.

Following my father’s death, my mother and I moved to a large metropolitan
area. I got involved in a youth group at a local Anglican Church with some
school friends, which provided social support system, but not a spiritual one. I
don’t recall ever meeting the priest. So, I continued without spiritual cover
and no positive male influence in my life.

Without guidance or counseling to help me, I eventually fell into a long-term
sexual relationship by the age of 17. The young man and I were serious about
each other and dated for almost a year before we were intimate, but once it
happened, it didn’t stop. We had rationalized our involvement because we planned
to marry once I graduated from college.

Unfortunately, even with the use of birth control, I found myself pregnant in
my last year of high school, in the midst of exams. My boyfriend suggested that
we marry, but I didn’t not want to be labeled "one of those girls" who had to
get married. To me, in my pride, fear and self-absorption, there was only one
solution. I would end the pregnancy.

The year was 1969 and abortions were illegal in this country. Many girls went
to England for the procedure, while others were able to find a doctor who would
make a house call. The only other alternative was a back street abortion …. Fear
of the latter method and my own self-preservation kicked in, and I went to my
mother about my situation. She was shocked, but prepared to support whatever
decision I made. Once again, there was no one to provide the spiritual cover in
our lives, to guide us. My mother brought a friend into the equation who knew
about the English solution, and also had contacts to get hold of an MD. We
finally settled on using a local doctor. Because abortions were illegal, doctors
could lose their license and go to jail if caught. As a result, the contact
advised us that the doctor would arrive sometime within a set number of days,
but we would not know exactly when. Within a couple of days, there was a knock
at the door.

The doctor injected a saline solution into my uterus, provided us with
warning signs, and left. Then, I waited. I won’t go into the details of what
this procedure does to the fetus; you can find this out for yourselves. Suffice
it to say if I had known, I do not believe I would have gone through with it.
But, I had been very carefully taught in sex education class that at this stage
of pregnancy, the fetus is just a few unidentifiable cells, simply a bit of
tissue, without conscience, unable to sense or feel. Some responsibility does
lie with the school system, my mother and the doctor for my lack of information,
but I must accept responsibility for never asking them and for the ultimate
decision. Within 48 hours, I had aborted the fetus, and I was free to get on
with my life. Cold and heartless, wasn’t I? Without solid biblical teaching, I
did not have the scriptures from Isaiah 49, Psalm 139 and Jeremiah 1 to provide
the guidance I needed. These scriptures tell us that God knew us even before we
were formed in the womb and He has plans for us.

Without spiritual cover and support, the relationship I had with that young
man soured, and went from bad to worse, even though we were engaged. About 1½
years later, I broke off the engagement.

The door I opened to the enemy allowed many harmful things to enter my life
including a growing interest in Eastern mysticism, psychic experimentation, and
a fascination with the occult; I even belonged to an occult book club. You see
one sin begets another. Without confession, repentance and forgiveness, sin can
live and breed in us.

From the time I broke up with that young man, until I met my first husband, I
had several sexual encounters. I was totally blinded about this being wrong and
sinful; I was living in the world, in a society preaching free love. The results
of that Societal Lie are evident all around us today; broken marriages, children
raised with no fathers, countless abortions, amorality rampant in our culture,
random, senseless shootings in schools, and swarmings by teens resulting in
deaths.

After graduating from college in 1971, I met an old friend from high school
and we started dating. A year later, we were married. During our courtship, we
maintained an active sexual relationship, which allowed even more opportunity
for Satan to influence my life. It is interesting that before we married, our
relations were good; afterwards they fell apart. My husband, who I loved,
repulsed me. My family doctor suggested these feelings were rooted in the stress
of a new marriage, but that wasn’t it. I’d entered into our marriage with
spiritual attachments to other men. I had repeatedly broken the instruction from
God's word that sexual relations before marriage are a sin. I did not heed the
scripture that states a man shall leave his father and mother, and be joined
with his wife and they will be as one flesh. Although my first relationship was
outside marriage, I had joined with a man and each relationship that followed
was an act of adultery. Today, I am free of those attachments and I realize
spiritual virginity can be re-established. To accomplish this, we must cut the
soul ties to the previous relationships, repent for our sin and ask God to
forgive us. If we do this, we are able to be one flesh with our spouse when we
marry. Otherwise, we bring with us emotional and spiritual baggage from all of
our previous relationships, baggage that gets stimulated with each sexual
encounter.

My husband and I experienced a very difficult time with intimacy. I thought
it was fear of pregnancy, so we kept trying new birth control methods. However,
the stress never left. Just think about it. Every time, we made love, every man
I had known was there in the bed with us. Talk about emotional and spiritual
confusion.

During our first year of marriage, researchers had brought out the IUD for
birth control and my doctor thought this might be a good alternative for me. She
made an appointment with a gynecologist and I had one installed. That was on a
Friday; the next day we were away at a wedding and the Saturday night, we made
love. I cannot explain to you in words exactly what I experienced that night,
but I can tell you, I knew I was pregnant, the instant it happened. Today, I
believe God had given me the opportunity to feel Him breathing life into my womb
at the moment of conception. Looking back, I realize how awesome an experience
God had provided for me - to feel life being created in me! Unfortunately, so
much spiritual blindness existed in me, I once again, thought only of myself and
did not recognize what had actually occurred.

Well, my husband and I were not in a good financial position, as if this
matters to God. However, we never considered Him in the equation. The Ten
Commandments were still only some good ideas I had learned about when I was a
kid. They certainly did not apply to this situation. My doctor gave us six weeks
to decide whether or not to terminate the pregnancy. The IUD could be removed
safely within that time frame without harm to the baby. Once again, I led the
way – out from under the headship of my husband, who wanted to go through with
the pregnancy. With my decision, I allowed the Spirit of Feminism into my life.
Here is a prime example of "it’s my body and I can do what I want with it".
Although abortions were now legal, hospitals usually required the signature of
both parties. But my husband never signed, and a D & C ended the pregnancy.
Again, I will not go into the details of what happens to a fetus with the
procedure, but it is horrific to say the least. While waiting outside the
operating room, the surgeon arrogantly spoke to me and asked me if I had taken
care of a birth control method following the abortion. I assured him that I had.
Today, I wish instead of attitude, he had given me information. However, he
didn’t, and once again, I accept the responsibility for murdering my second
child.

As for my marriage, we stayed friends and lived together but over the next 5
years, we drifted apart emotionally. Finally, we separated and divorced a year
later.

In the last year of my first marriage, my interest in personal development,
New Age Philosophy and the psychic led me to take a course on the subject.
Through the program we were taught a "new spirituality", one I believed was the
truth, one that seemed to incorporate God and Jesus. It spoke of
us as "gods in the making" and in ways co-creators with God and equal to Him. A
relationship developed between the instructor and I and we were married in a
couple of year later. Through the first 12 years of our marriage, we worked in
the New Age field, believing we were doing God’s work, but in truth, we now know
we were worshipping "other Gods", and the good that came of our work was
credited to us, not our heavenly Father.

Although you've read a lot about the results of my sin, there are more
far-reaching effects for me to share. When I married my second and current
husband of 21 years, he was prepared to attempt to reverse his vasectomy, if I
wanted children. He’d had his family, four children in total. I cried myself to
sleep several nights thinking about what to do, and finally decided it best that
we not try. And so resulted another decision I regret. Once again, I believe
Satan had such a firm hold on me that I was incapable of making a sane decision.

Finally, after 35 years out of the church, we made a decision to return to
the Body of Christ through the Anglican Church, and began to seriously pursue an
interest in healing prayer, much to the disapproval of our parish priest. We
were babes in terms of the church; politics, the charismatic movement, renewal
and all that had been taking place in the seventies and eighties. Moreover, we
were babes in terms of knowing the Biblical foundations for what we felt called
to do. We thought we could pursue our previous work under the cover of the
church. We were both blind to the truth about what we had been doing, unaware of
the sin we committed with our work. Today, we realize the work we were involved
with was satanic and a counterfeit of the real gifts of the spirit. In Matthew
7: 21 - 23, we are warned by the Lord himself that many will prophesy and cast
out demons in His name, but He will say, "I never knew you". My husband and I
were such as these, acting out of rebellion and our own flesh, claiming to know
Jesus, but unsubmitted to God.

However, I want you to know that through all these years of traveling that
twisted path; God had his hand on us. We were both baptized and confirmed in the
church, so we were His. We were simply, unknowingly walking in rebellion.
There’s that word again - "Rebellion". How often it slips into the deep, dark
hidden crevices of our lives, like a slithering, silent serpent.

Although we were now in the church, we never received any teaching about
spiritual cover and authority. To us, our priest was just the guy who preached
and gave us communion. About 3 years after our return to the church, through
some, God-lead circumstances, we were drawn to a large independent Charismatic
church. Although that church has a goodly number of its own problems, I will be
forever grateful for the life we found there and the healing God started within
me.

We became involved with the prayer team, which provided opportunity for a lot
of good Bible based teaching. Over the years, we were there, we learned about
authority, confession, repentance and the power of forgiveness. I came to
realize the sin in my life, and acknowledged this to my husband and myself.
However, during the first couple of years, I never shared my story with anyone
else; I feared rejection for the horrible sin in my life. During some special
Christian Counseling training sessions, each person underwent personal ministry
for healing the emotional scars in their lives. During one of the teaching
sessions, the instructor shared information about abortion; he called a spade, a
spade and murder, murder. Using real life examples from his counseling practice,
he spoke of what we reap when we sow seeds of abortion. His teaching caused me
to reflect on the two men with whom I had become pregnant. I learned that by not
forgiving them and not forgiving me, we had set up circumstances in which the
enemy could operate. God tells us in Exodus 20: 5 about punishing the children
for the sins of the fathers. My boyfriend from high school married about a year
after we broke off our engagement. Subsequently, he had three children. The
first was a little girl born with spinabifida. She was apparently a beautiful
and bright child, but she had no spine and died at the age of eight. Knowing
him, he would have been devastated. In the second case, my first husband had two
sons, the first was born with a cleft pallet and had to undergo some horrendous
surgery to correct the problem. The Lord revealed to me during prayer and
ministry time, that these birth defects were a direct result of our lack of
repentance and forgiveness. For me personally, I reaped an empty womb; I was
never to bear any children.

During the prayer ministry, the Lord brought me to the place where I released
both men, and I pray that God in His mercy will free those four boys from any
reaping in their lives. The Father also gave me two special gifts. He brought to
my remembrance a dream 10 years before, in which I am sitting in an empty
theatre waiting for a play to start. Into the theatre comes a beautiful
blond-haired girl, she comes over to me and climbs up on my lap. Back then, I
thought she was the daughter of a friend, but God revealed that she was my first
aborted child. When I awoke from the dream, I could hardly speak. When my
daughter put her arms around me, I felt the most powerful love I have ever
experienced in my life. In the ministry time, she told me she loved me; she was
okay because she with the Father, and she forgave me. The second gift from God
was a vision of my second child - a dark-haired handsome boy, who definitely
bore a family resemblance. He also spoke words of forgiveness to me. During the
ministry session, I was encouraged to name my children. The Lord told me their
names: Jessica and Aaron. Over the months following that ministry time, many
people spoke to me about the spiritual children God was going to bring into my
life, and He has been faithful in this. He gave me the scripture from Isaiah 54:
1-3 which speaks of barren women being even more fruitful than married women.
Although I was married, I feel this word was given to encourage me, to let me
know that now He could use me to nurture children of any age who needed to know
a mother’s love.

You see, even though three of my second husband’s children lived with us for
a number of years, I never felt I could or should, be a mother to them. They had
a real mother; I didn’t want to interfere in that relationship. I now realize
the error of my assumptions back then. They needed a mother, and a second mother
would have been better than another friend. I did them no favour by pulling back
from this relationship. Once again, I see how spiritual blindness led me to make
ineffective choices, and I have repented of this decision.

My choice to abort the lives God placed in me, led me over and over to abort
relationships, like my husband’s children, careers I dreamed of and numerous
creative projects that I recognize as inspirations from God. The rebellion in my
life and the spirit of abortion held me firmly in its grip. Although I had
repented, been forgiven by my murdered children and by my brothers and sisters
in Christ without any judgment, guilt and fear still plagued me. I seemed unable
to let go and get on with my life. Intellectually I knew I was forgiven, but my
heart remained heavy.

Then, a few months ago, my priest shared with me from a book called REQUIEM
HEALING. In their book, John Mitton and Russ Parker talk about the power of the
Requiem Healing Mass – a mass or communion for the dead. The authors had both
witnessed powerful releases in the lives of those who had been unable to
separate themselves from loved ones who had passed away by using this sacrament.
What spoke directly to me were the references to requiem masses done for
children lost through miscarriages and abortions. Mitton and Parker discovered
that complete emotional healings took place when parents named their unborn
children, and released them to the Lord during these Eucharists.

When I heard about this, I got very excited. I knew I needed a requiem mass
for my two children, to acknowledge their lives – they were very real. In
addition, I needed to confess that I did not simply end a pregnancy, but I
murdered two helpless souls. My priest prayed and received confirmation to give
the sacrament.

About a week later, I had an appointment for a job interview. My priest had
called me the night before and said, "I’ll be at your place at 7:00 a.m. to do
the Requiem Mass". The Lord had quickened in him the need to do this before I
went for the interview. Following the Eucharist, I drove to the interview
praising the Lord, singing and praying in the Spirit, feeling a new freedom.
From that day to this, I can honestly say that most of the random fears that
often plagued me are gone. I have no more fear of man, only a healthy
fear and awe of God. I have learned how submission to God's authority and to the
delegated authority in my life brings freedom, not control. In this new place in
my life, I walk in the gifts with which God had graced me, learning afresh each
day to listen and obey Him. When I need to make choices and decisions, I seek
His input or that of His delegated authority in my life. If I act otherwise, I
will plant more seeds of rebellion, which can only produce more bad fruit.

Through confession, repentance, and forgiveness sealed with the body and
blood of Jesus, I received the final release from those sins birthed in
rebellion. Today, I know I am a sinner but I also know I am a Beloved Child of
the Most High God, I have 2 children safe with Him in heaven and He has a plan
to use my life and testimony to help bring healing to others. He has blessed me
with four stepchildren and six grandchildren, and He has brought many spiritual
children into my life. My first spiritual daughter is a particular blessing. Her
background of pain, maternal rejection and abuse, drew me to her 5 years ago at
a conference. The Lord used me to speak healing words into her life and we have
been connected ever since. She often calls me 2 or 3 times a week, to talk, seek
advice, discuss her spiritual journey, and it is no coincidence the path she is
traveling mirrors in many ways my own.

Though I still experience tears of regret over not having my own physical
children to hold and with whom to share my life, I no longer feel the painful
emotions caused by my sin. I praise the Lord for what He has done; through Him,
I am healed and victorious. To Jesus be all the Glory. AMEN.